He stands out like a sore thumb. He is 6’6″. I am 5’5″ taller than most Filipinas, but I stand like a dwarf beside him. He is white. I’m a dark-skinned Filipina with small eyes. A very odd couple. I know.

We were walking around Borobudur (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) last December, without knowing it was a holiday season for locals as well. In almost every corner, a local Indonesian or a group of students would stop us and ask him for a photo. Most of the time, I played the photographer. Moments like this make him extremely uncomfortable. Yes, westerners are often approached for a photo on this side of the world, but I have never seen as crazy as that.

He is a real introvert. I am an extroverted introvert. He is an interesting sight for many: too tall a person walking among us short Asians. He is perfectly fine being a wallpaper and enjoying the place as genuinely as possible. To be white and 6’6″, however, are not the perfect combinations when you are traveling around Southeast Asia. He eventually ran away when the crowd wanting a photo with him got thicker.

When we retold the story to the hostel’s owners we were staying, they joked they would sell statement shirts like Take a Photo for 20K Rupiah! to their Western guests.

T asked me, if he cannot be counted as exotic too—we Southeast Asians exoticizing them, the westerners—because he knew firsthand my issues with the word.

For a moment there, I wondered too.

But.

Most Southeast Asians want a photo of, with westerners out of sheer adoration: white. White means rich, for many. White means beautiful and handsome. White means snow. White means life better than ours. We never thought of them as exotic. Did we?

Three years ago, I found myself traveling around Donsol (Sorsogon, Philippines) with three young Canadians who started their day drunk and ended it drunk. Booze in the Philippines is so cheap compared to Canada, so they primarily traveled here for booze, weed, and anything fun like riding on the top of a tricycle. They were young, reckless, and easily forgiven for things locals do not normally do.

With the encouragement from the tricycle drivers, we went to Gura to witness cockfighting: the favorite of many local men in the countryside. The boys, with Red Horse in hand, bet and won successively.

Everything was so exotic, one mentioned.

“What do you exactly mean with ‘exotic,’” I asked.

“Brutal.” Indeed, blood sprouted from the rooster’s flesh. It was indeed very brutal and cringing for someone like me who has more heart for animals than for humans. Activities like this are banned in the West. I do understand that there should be a stop on brutal cultures like this, but I think gun control in the US is a more pressing issue, and therefore a more exotic case? It sounded wrong, right? Non sequitur!

“Would I find winter exotic too? Cause I’m pretty sure it is brutal.”

“Hmm, yeah?” He was not convinced of himself.

We bought a bihag—the meat of the bitten rooster—and had it cleaned and cooked at one of the driver’s place.

The boys got grossed out when they saw the blood and bones of the butchered chicken.

They said, they are too white-washed. Westerners are white-washed—a variation of brainwashed, I supposed—when they are too used to the Western ways that other ways gross them out. Since then, it is a term I loved using to tease my western acquaintances. I barely used it to T. He loved our food—he even loved our sister countries’ food more than I do. He never complained of our Asian ways; well except for the fact that we handwash our clothes when we are traveling together and imagine a 6’6″ giant stooping on a sauna-like bathroom scrubbing his shorts clean. I love handwashing my clothes and am too stingy to pay for laundry.

Firewood cooking, handwashing clothes, eating chicken feet are some of the many things westerners considered exotic. Our ways are way too primitive, so backward, and sometimes puke-inducing like eating balot or chicken intestine.

Here in the Philippines particularly, women of my skin color often get unsolicited comments from acquaintances or strangers we met on our trips that foreigners dig our skin color. I used to think our local men do not appreciate our beauty. But I soon noticed I get this comment mostly from women, some of them are afraid to go out in the sun and are crazy about whitening products. Oh, yeah, it is one of the many colonial hangups we have here.

To be called exotic, which is also a form of racial microaggression in the west, does not sound like a compliment to my ear. To be called Pocahontas is never a compliment either

The definition of beauty here used to be or still largely singular: either you are mestisa-looking or fair-skinned. But it is getting varied, I hope.

More than once, I got emails from foreign men, mostly middle-aged, asking if I can guide them around Cebu. Of course, there is an underlying meaning behind this question: hankie-pankie is part of the package. I look delectable to the westerner’s eyes on my blog and IG (I’m photogenic, by the way, but my smooth-looking skin is pretty scarred in real life).

I would say, “Yeah, I could guide you. But no hankie-pankie!”

“Eh?!”

“I’m far from the exotic being you thought I am.”

To be called exotic undermines one’s intellect. It limits one’s femininity to being a sex object of Western men. It is subjugating.

I would never hear from these people again.

A boy in Mawun Beach (Lombok, Indonesia) said, “You’re like us.”

And when we asked him, why he thought so, he answered,

“Because you [imitated the burping sound]. His kind does not,” he said while pointing T.

I burst in laughter. T at first found my unladylike manners like burping and eating like a construction worker rude and disgusting. Our social etiquette is unsurprisingly patterned after the West (that’s why I adore the Japanese for their undying love of slurping their food).

These rude manners eventually became a private joke between us; we take turns in annoying each other. I sometimes tease him with a dried fish kiss. T tried eating chicken feet in Jakarta and dried squid in Chiang Rai and decided they were not for him; on the same manner, I can only handle a bit of pasta or pizza.

Oddly here in Asia, to be called exotic is taken by many as a compliment.

“Exotic,” for the innocent mind, merely means “being different or unusual.” And this still rings true to some foreign travelers. They marveled at our differentness without hidden disgust and mockery. Just pure joy and wide-eyed wonder. Some fell in love. Some vowed not to come back.

But if one retraced its origin, one would know why I hate such word on the same manner I hate being called “Pocahontas.” To be called exotic, which is also a form of racial microaggression in the west, does not sound like a compliment to my ear. To be called Pocahontas is never a compliment either; it is a derogatory term that means “a spoiled child” or “a naughty one,” but I do not mind being called naughty at all. Pocahontas’ real story, which is very sad by the way, is a far cry from the Disney movie we all enjoyed as a kid.

I sometimes think that I am overly sensitive for matters like this. But one can feel if one is being exoticized. In the context of postcolonial period, exoticism often leads to hegemony: the power of the ruling class (aka colonizers, aka neocolonizers) “to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all, often not only through means of economic and political control but more subtly through the control of education and media.”

To put it simply, people who called us exotic think they are better humans than us, their ways better than ours, that we are better off imitating and living their ways.

A professor from the University of the Philippines angered a group of artists for saying that the aquiline nose of Carrot Man  [a handsome farmer whose fame started on social media] is from the intermarriage of missionaries with Cordillerans that resulted in an improved race. Again, improved. Again, as if there is something wrong with the people from the Cordilleras, the home of the god-made-by-human-hands Batad Rice Terraces.

To be called exotic undermines one’s intellect. It limits one’s femininity to being a sex object of Western men. It is subjugating.

I lurrve my rice as much as you love your pasta. I love dried fish as much as you love your cheese and sandwiches.

We do not find your blond or red hair and pale skin exotic. We do not find you exotic. We find you different and oftentimes beautiful. T is a beautiful soul.

And we wish you would see us in the same light. We wish you would see us Southeast Asians as human as you: different, beautiful, flawed.